Bristol’s potent underground has Max Kelan Pearce’s grubby fingerprints all over it. From Salac‘s arcane rituals, Bad Tracking‘s circuit-fried electronics, to the post-punk DJ sets under Slack Alice, Pearce’s many projects and collaborations have yielded a towering reputation within the Avon avant-garde. Twisting Ministry’s infamous metal fence from their ’89 tour into an enclosed cage and plunged in red light, Pearce has dropped the monikers and pursued hellish live sets of personal, pared-down exorcisms of caustic, martial industrialism that’s both intoxicatingly debauched and venomously confrontational. Donning the circular shades of a comic book assassin with the bare-chested braces of a hyper-real proletariat, Kelan appears to have wandered into our austerity ravaged existence from a land of factories, oil, and socialist emancipation, regaling tales of “sleazy noir, vice, and earthly transgression”, while also warning of the rich parasites which threaten such liberation.

Kelan’s debut Downtown is one man’s ferocity and a drum machine filtered through cold resonance and acidic sift. Each track contains nothing but Kelan’s vocal commands aside deadly programmed percussion that takes EBM to greater depths of primal reductionism. Kelan’s engineering chops shift the character of the drums enough to keep the album feeling one-note. ‘Unpaid World’ features expertly sampled metallic scrapes and clangour against piston hiss, flanged and modulated marches on the alien radiated ‘Cracked Reflection’ leaves a metallic aftertaste, and you’re reminded just how effective a well-placed cowbell can be on the stomper ‘Towers of Future Guilt’. The nuanced sonics and textures are all held together by an acutely primordial, machine precision which always balances the belligerence with a pumped urge to slam and gyrate to the corroded drills.

“I’m a prostitute whose only customer is me, and I can’t afford to fuck myself!” gobs Kelan on album opener ‘Unpaid World’. Downtown‘s lyrical examinations of contemporary malaise and English rot, coupled with the quasi-spoken vocal delivery, could be unthinkingly assigned as part of the new wave of gritty commentators such as Sleaford Mods or Benefits, but the spike of Whitehouse extremity and lewd beckoning ensures Kalen’s cage-rattling rancour is a distinctly separate beast. Strutting through pleasure-seeking encouragement and firey condemnations of prudish obstructions that hinder hedonism, a smattering of Bad Tracking’s Cronenbergian body horror permeates on ‘Cracked Reflections’ details of jagged pieces of mirror twisting in stomachs. Despite the acerbic front, there’s a comradely arm that reaches into the industrial whirlpool, the thematic inspiration of Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’ anchoring the album’s motif seductive enticement amid a world on fire.

“You fucking need it” snarls Kelan on ‘The Rag’. The implicit understanding that the ephemeral, dungeon escape of a Kelan live set offers a short-term high within an inevitable societal collapse. Real, uncompromising, and urgent in its offering of sordid retreat, Downtown is an abrasive shove of machine blasts and biting expanse where debauchery is granted without shame, but the wandering thoughts of ‘bread and circuses’ appeasement toward the parasite class who want you distracted gnaws in the pits of your psyche.